Weekly Poem: ‘Redemption Song’

Finally fall. At last the mist, heat’s haze, we woke these past weeks with

has lifted. We find ourselves chill, a briskness we hug ourselves in. Frost greying the ground.

Grief might be easy if there wasn’t still such beauty — would be far simpler if the silver

maple didn’t thrust its leaves into flame, trusting that spring will find it again.

All this might be easier if there wasn’t a song still lifting us above it, if wind didn’t trouble

my mind like water. I half expect to see you fill the autumn air like breath–

At night I sleep on clenched fists. Days I’m like the child who on the playground

falls, crying not so much from pain as surprise. I’m tired of tide

taking you away, then back again– what’s worse, the forgetting or the thing

you can’t forget. Neither yet– last summer’s choir of crickets

grown quiet.

Kevin Young is Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing and English and Curator of Literary Collections and the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University. He is the author of s the author of seven books of poetry, including “Ardency: A Chronicle of the Amistad Rebels” (Knopf, 2011) and “Jelly Roll: A Blues” (Knopf, 2003), which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the Paterson Poetry Prize.